Poor Scores Leave an Afrocentric School in Chicago Vulnerable

CHICAGO — Test scores suggest that the Barbara A. Sizemore Academy, an African-centered school, is struggling mightily. Its students in third through eighth grades scored in only the 14th percentile in reading on national achievement tests last year and in the eighth percentile in math.

Those statistics have prompted the Chicago Public Schools to recommend closing Sizemore. But here in a South Side neighborhood riddled with crime, blight and poverty, where the black experience can seem like a constant struggle, Sizemore’s many supporters argue that their students’ success is measured by much more than test scores. The school has done exceedingly well, they say, instilling confidence in a psychologically battered population.

“When you talk about children who are suffering from all the ills of, you know, the residual effects of slavery,” said Danielle Robinson, who is in her third year as Sizemore’s principal, “absolutely this is where they need to be.”

Like dozens of African-centered schools across the country, Sizemore embodies much of what racial justice activists are screaming from rooftops. Suspension is a last resort. Teachers address students by courtesy titles and their last names. The accomplishments of blacks are front and center in lesson plans.

Yet many African-centered schools have found themselves on the chopping block because of subpar testing, the proliferation of large charter networks with more resources and political clout, and lingering angst over Black Power principles.

Whereas supporters of African-themed education see their work as self-empowerment, some others — a number of them in the moneyed, mostly white elite — see something much scarier.

“They have a double whammy,” said Martell L. Teasley, the chairman of the department of social work at the University of Texas at San Antonio, who recently wrote about Afrocentric charters in the Journal of African American Studies. Not only can’t they compete with large charters, he said, but “they’re more demonized because they’re black.”

His study of about two dozen Afrocentric charter schools across the country, published in January, found that most of them fall short of national testing standards. Dr. Teasley said that he supported the concept and mission of the schools, but that they needed to prepare their students better for standardized tests. Without that, he said, African-centered schools will fail to earn mainstream legitimacy and will be soft targets for school boards looking to make budget cuts.

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Asia Donahue, 10, read a mathematics question on Tuesday in the fourth-grade class of Kiana Richard, left, at Sizemore.CreditAlyssa Schukar for The New York Times

Illinois’s charter school commission is scheduled to vote on Tuesday on whether to accept the Chicago Public Schools’ recommendation to close Sizemore.

The district is financially troubled and gearing up for a contract fight against the charter-averse teachers union. Yet it argues that its decision to close Sizemore and three other charters has to do with academics, plain and simple.

There are many small charters that test well, Emily Bittner, a spokeswoman for the district, wrote in an email.

While the district “values providing enriching cultural experiences for all our students,” Ms. Bittner wrote, “it is unacceptable to fail to teach students basic math and reading skills, no matter which school model is used.”

Sizemore, like other city schools in its position, attributes its low test scores partly to the challenging population it serves: 97 percent of its students are from low-income households. But the school argues that the Afrocentric model provides a layer of social nurturing that prepares even poor testers for success.

Sizemore is named after a former Washington school superintendent, the first African-American woman to lead a major school system. Part of a network of three African-centered charters, it caters to 280 students in kindergarten through eighth grade. There is another K-8 school, the Betty Shabazz Academy, and there is a high school, DuSable Leadership Academy. While Sizemore’s test scores compare unfavorably with national figures, they are also well below the city median for third through eighth graders, who last year scored in the 48 percentile for reading and 52 for math.

The network dates to the late 1960s, when Carol D. Lee, a professor of education and social policy at Northwestern University, and her husband, Haki R. Madhubuti, created an African-centered institute that evolved into a private school. In the late 1990s, with the charter school movement gaining steam, their school became a charter that eventually opened three campuses. Shabazz, which rates higher than Sizemore in state rankings, and DuSable are not facing a shutdown.

There are no reliable statistics on the national number of African-centered schools, which were born in the 1970s alongside the Black Power Movement. But people who work in them and study them say their numbers peaked in the 1990s and have dropped since. There also was a rift in the 1990s between those that chose to become charters and those that remained private in order to maintain more control.

At the heart of the dispute between the district and Sizemore is a disagreement over how much Sizemore students have improved on test scores. That calculation is complicated by Sizemore’s switching in 2014 to the Common Core standardized test from an Illinois version.

In 2015, Sizemore did improve to a Level 2 school from a Level 3, the lowest rating in the district’s scale. Sizemore argues that its improvements, sparked in large part by the more rigorous curriculum that Ms. Robinson initiated when she became principal, warrant keeping it open.

The two sides also disagree over whether Sizemore fulfilled all the requirements of a remediation plan set forth by the district in 2014. The city said it did not, so in November it recommended Sizemore for closing.

Anger over the decision poured out during an appeal hearing last week in Sizemore’s aging auditorium, where school supporters pleaded for more than two hours with two of the nine charter commissioners who will vote on its fate. The protest spirit also loomed large.

Dave Flynn, turning his attention from the commissioners to the crowd of hundreds, suggested holding a sit-in.

“We cannot depend on this board — we cannot depend on this city,” he said to rousing applause. “We know what the city’s about and the harm that it’s done to our communities and to black education in general. So in order for us to save Sizemore, we have to invest in our own power, which is black power.”

It is that spirit that undergirds life at Sizemore, where students begin each day to the beat of traditional African drumming. They raise their right fists to salute both the American and the red, black and green Pan-African flags.

“We are African people,” they say in unison in what they call a unity circle. Later, they add that they “stress the development of our bodies, minds, souls and consciousness” and are committed to “sustainable living, self-determination and self-respect.”

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At a hearing last Monday about the proposed closing of Sizemore, Marquinn McDonald pointed to his daughter Saida, a second grader, saying she benefited from attending the academy.CreditAlyssa Schukar for The New York Times

The theory is that in a world where negative images of blacks breed hopelessness, a curriculum centered on the strength, beauty and accomplishments of the African diaspora lifts disadvantaged black children. And that prepares them for success better than a traditional Eurocentric education, which advocates say reduces blacks in history to little more than slaves and the token civil rights hero.

Much of what happens in the classrooms at Sizemore is typical of any school. Kindergartners were jumping up and down while counting by 11s on a recent morning. Third graders were studying words. Yet black culture was embedded in the routine.

To create a familial bond, students address the faculty and staff as “Mama” and “Baba,” meaning mother and father in Swahili. They roam hallways adorned with images of black leaders like Dedan Kimathi, the Kenyan independence leader, and Lorraine Hansberry, the playwright. Students are taught to conduct themselves by seven ancient Egyptian virtues: truth, justice, righteousness, order, balance, harmony and reciprocity.

When Tolu Solola’s fifth-grade science class was studying the water cycle, the discussion included a study of how water is delivered to countries worldwide.

First graders, who already had learned to sing a song in Spanish, were learning to speak Igbo, a major language in Nigeria.

In Jocelyn Mills’s eighth-grade reading class, a discussion of “To Kill a Mockingbird” segued into a conversation about the controversial 2014 police killing of Laquan McDonald in Chicago. Could the injustice that the fictional Tom Robinson faced in the novel happen to someone today? Ms. Mills asked.

“Racism, prejudice and all those things are very, very complex, just like human beings,” Ms. Mills told the class. “This story tells our story now, and if you don’t understand that, then you don’t sometimes understand what you’re looking at in 2016.”

Self-empowerment is what struck Aje Smothers when she enrolled in Sizemore as a bright but unmotivated sixth grader a few years back. Now 15 and a freshman at one of the city’s top high schools, Ms. Smothers said the school had shown her a different side of black culture.

“Where I live, it’s like all we see is the ignorant side — the fighting, the shooting, all the bad,” she said. But at Sizemore, “we learned more about our heritage and where we come from.”

“It gave us more confidence, like we can be something,” she continued. “We don’t have to fall into the influence of what’s around us because our ancestors did better than that.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: Poor Scores Leave Afrocentric School Vulnerable. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe